Lead & Limbs Podcast Inaugural Episode

There's a moment, somewhere deep in that pre-dawn dark, when you cinch the shooting glove tight, nock an arrow by feel, and remind yourself that nothing in the world exists right now except you, the wind, and whatever is walking through those trees. I've lived in that moment for going on thirty years. It never gets old. It never gets easy. And I've never once wanted it to.

I'm a longbow man through and through. I came up hunting the way most folks learn a second language — haltingly, humbled, loving every hard-won word of it. My arrows are cedar and my broadheads are hand-sharpened steel. I still count a deer at thirty yards as a gift, not a given. That's the world I live in. That's the world that made me.

So when people hear I've started a podcast alongside a man who builds AR-15 hunting rifles for a living, they raise an eyebrow. And I get it. I truly do. On paper, Nick Carpenter and I don't belong in the same deer camp. But that's exactly why this thing is going to work.

Meet the Man Behind the Brass

Nick Carpenter is the owner of Brenton USA, one of the more innovative AR-platform hunting rifle companies operating today. Nick is the kind of guy who can tell you the exact ballistic coefficient of a 6.5 Creedmoor load at altitude while simultaneously breaking down why the Midwest rut hits when it does. He's a serious hunter and a serious outdoorsman — a man who came to the woods on his own terms, just like the rest of us. He just happened to get there with a magazine-fed rifle and a whole lot of precision engineering behind him.

I respect that. Hunting doesn't belong to any one method or any one tradition. It belongs to anyone willing to go out there and earn it — to learn the land, read the animal, put in the miles, and honor what they take. Nick does all of that. He just does it with brass.

I do it with limbs and wood and feathers — the same way people have been doing it for ten thousand years. Between the two of us, we cover a lot of ground.

Why Lead & Limbs?

The name says everything. Lead, for the bullet — for Nick's world of precision rifles, terminal ballistics, and the engineering that goes into a clean, ethical harvest at distance. Limbs, for the bow — for the bent wood that stores energy in silence, for the instinctive shot, for the intimate, close-quarters game of traditional archery. Together? That's the whole spectrum of American hunting culture, sitting across a fire from each other, telling the truth.

I've spent my writing career trying to put the experience of the traditional bowhunter into words — the meditative discipline of it, the failure rate, the singular joy when it all comes together inside twenty yards. And I've always believed that the best hunting conversations happen not between people who already agree on everything, but between people who respect each other enough to push back. That's what Nick and I have. We don't see every tree the same way. We don't hunt the same way. But we both believe, down to the bone, in the value of wild things and wild places.

The Inaugural Episode — An Honest Conversation

We didn't script it. We didn't polish it. We sat down, hit record, and talked the way hunters actually talk — winding through gear and philosophy and memory and the kind of hunting stories that only make sense at the end of a long season. You'll hear Nick and me figure out what this show is going to be, in real time. That feels right to me. The best camps I've ever been in were built on the fly.

In this first episode, we lay out who we are and why we care about this. Nick gets into what drives his thinking at Brenton USA — the ethos behind building rifles designed specifically for the hunting field, not the range, and why that distinction matters. I talk about how traditional archery has shaped the way I see every hunt, regardless of what weapon I'm carrying. We talk about the future of hunting, the culture wars happening within our own community, and why the biggest threat to hunters isn't the anti-hunters — it's hunters who've forgotten what connects us.

We also do what any good first episode should do: we argue a little. We laugh a lot. And we make a promise to you — that this will always be a place where the conversation is real, the hunting is serious, and no method of ethical harvest gets left out of the campfire circle.

Whether you're shooting a recurve in the timber or a precision rifle off a bipod at five hundred yards — if you're doing it right, you're one of ours. Pull up a stump.

What to Expect Going Forward

Nick and I have a long list of conversations we want to have — with each other and with guests who know things we don't. We'll get into the science of hunting: whitetail behavior, elk country strategy, the biology of fair chase. We'll get into gear in a way that doesn't feel like an infomercial — real field use, honest failure, hard-won knowledge. We'll talk about the writing life and what it means to document the hunting experience for those who come after us. And we will absolutely, unabashedly argue about which method of hunting is superior.

(For the record: I have strong opinions about this. Nick is wrong. He knows it. We'll sort it out on air.)

But more than anything, Lead & Limbs is going to be a show about why any of this matters in the first place. Why we go. Why we keep going. What we're looking for in that dark timber that we can't seem to find anywhere else. That question has fueled thirty years of my life, and I don't expect to run out of answers anytime soon.

I'm grateful you found this. I hope it becomes something you come back to — not because it's polished or packaged, but because it's true. The woods deserve that much from us.

Go listen to Episode One. Then go sharpen something.